Usually Paul regales us with older car transporters but here’s a newer one I came across recently. I was somewhat surprised to see this one sitting outside a hotel near the Tesla Supercharger in Sidney, Nebraska a few weeks ago as I had never realized that day cab transporters would be used to carry cars long distances, or at least long enough distances to necessitate an overnight stop. Usually there’d just be a sleeper cab involved, at least for normal cargo.
Increasing my interest of course was the load of eight covered Corvettes and a solitary very high-spec Camaro perched atop the tail. Bowling Green, Kentucky, from where Corvettes stem, is over 1,000 miles from Sidney and that doesn’t account for the detour to wherever the Camaro joined the party.
The driving force here is what looks to be either a 2006 or 2007 Sterling LT9500 by my best estimation and lots of peering at google photos. Sterling being a brand of Mercedes it likely carries the 12.8liter Mercedes MBE-4000 6-cylinder engine producing 450 horsepower, made more probable by the small Mercedes badge on the cab door below the Sterling badge.
This one is run by Jack Cooper Transport Company, a long-time Corvette carrier apparently, that operates a very large trucking fleet. The most notable thing about this particular truck itself was that the front grille’s plastichrome seems to be wrinkling like that of a 2004 Nissan Murano. Still, if used ones that I came across are any indication, this truck has likely already seen at least 700,000 miles under its wheels and seems poised to continue in that vein for the foreseeable future.
It isn’t often that the cargo items on a car carrier each have more power than the truck doing the pulling. But in this case making it all worthy of the CC salute in the foreground there are eight 2021 Corvettes on their way to presumably excited owners-to-be anxious to squeeze out every one of the 495 horses chomping to be let loose from each one. The one on the bottom level just behind the cab as well as the last one on the top deck around the bend each has a set of the optional wheels on it while the others all carry the standard item but in Carbon Flash coloring (also an option). Beyond that it’s hard to tell what exactly is under the covers.
As exciting as Corvettes are to many people, it’s possible that each of the eight actually carry a lower sticker price than the yellow Camaro that’s fully exposed here. And they are quite a bit less powerful too. That’s due to this one being the top dog in the Camaro lineup, the ZL-1 with its 6.2liter Supercharged V8 engine producing 650hp as well as 650lb-ft of torque through either a 6-speed manual or 10-speed automatic transmission. Starting price? $64,195, some $3,200 more than the base price of the Corvette. If my time with the Dodge Challenger Hellcat Redeye last year is any indication, this is an overwhelmingly powerful machine for the street.
This particular Camaro ZL-1 though carries at least two options that I can see – the yellow paint for $395 and more significantly the $7,500 Extreme Track Performance Package as evidenced by the wheels (19″ instead of the stock 20″), summer only track-ready Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar 3R tires, and the absolutely massive Visible Weave Carbon Fiber Rear Spoiler that as a stand-alone option without the other stuff in the package costs $5,495 just by itself. The package also includes a highly user-adjustable suspension and some other goodies as well. Suffice to say, anyone ordering this car is likely a serious fan and if you see it at a light, don’t mess with it, it may not end well.
But for now the cars are just slumbering, and the driver of this rig is presumably getting a good night’s rest him or herself in order to continue the journey to somewhere North and/or West of here.
Sidney, Nebraska, June 18, 2021, 2:26 a.m.
Daimler bought the L-Line line from Ford when it decided to exit the heavy truck business, I think partially because it wanted to use the Louisville plant for making F-150’s. They built a plant in St. Thomas, Ontario and built Sterlings there, which I visited once. It was not a very complex operation, primarily assembly of bought-in components, I think even the cabs were manufactured elsewhere. They also built some medium-duty Sterlings which shared a lot of components with the Freightliner medium-duty line. I thought a lot of these came with Detroit Diesel power, but sounds like in this case it had the M-B engine. I am always suprised to see a Sterling on the road in California, considering that it’s now been 12 years since the last one was made.
An odd rarity is the Sterling-badged Dodge Ram, not sure who thought that was necessary.
Those dealers who had been Ford dealers that now had no class 4-5 trucks to sell. So they got the Fuso Canter as the Sterling 360 and the Ram as the Sterling Bullet.
I wonder if the Camaro was being used at a Bowling Green test facility to compare its performance with the new Corvette, and is now on its way to a dealer (maybe the same one for all the Corvettes) for resale. It would make sense that a dealer who specializes in Corvettes would be a good place to try and sell a top-spec performance Camaro.
Some advice from Driver Dan, the Sterling Man:
….mind you, around 100 years ago.
Often these car carriers are refurbished after they are fully depreciated. Much less expensive than buying a new power unit and more available than new class 8 trucks. The body / rack is cut off and a new one mounted. Often anew trailer is built to mate if the old trailer is too rusty or worn to rebuild.
We see a lot of Sterling’s in my area. In fact the Ford Louisville that hasn’t been built since 1998 is still a pretty common site around here. The dealer in our area that sold Ford’s and then Sterling’s was very successful and had a large share of our market area. A lot of operators are keeping the older trucks around as the newer trucks with all the emissions hardware on them are not as reliable as the older trucks.
We did not have very good luck with the Mercedes engines. We bought two. The first failure happened about 6 months after the truck was put in service. The turbocharger failed and it took 3 months to get a replacement. The second truck had been in service a couple of years when a connecting rod exited out the side of the block. No more Mercedes 4000’s for us.
Sterling seemed to have a love/hate relationship with Cummins and Cat. I suspect Mercedes didn’t like selling a competitor’s engine. I suspect that was a major reason the Mercedes bought Detroit Diesel.
The Sterling was a good truck its a shame that Mercedes killed it. It did not have a large market share which didn’t help but the odd thing is Mercedes didn’t kill Western Star which had an even smaller market share. I am seeing more Western Star trucks now as that brand is expanding coverage into the market that Sterling and Ford were so well established.
The diesel emissions rules of 2010 really changed the whole truck market. The odd one for 2010 was Caterpillar’s decision to drop out off the on-highway engine market but yet Cat enters the truck market with a truck manufactured by International using an International engine! Well that didn’t work out so good.
The peeling face chrome on plastic has been a problem forever. I stayed away from this stuff if I could when buying vehicles. Chrome bumpers are better than painted bumpers.
We had/have two Sterlings on our fire dept. They each were A9500’s and and were powered by Detroit Diesel Series 60’s, 2500gal tankers.The A9500 was the replacement for the Ford LT9000 (had one of those also, a 3000gal tanker with Detroit Silver 92 2 stroke). The Sterlings are still serving and going strong.
Sterling shutting down was part of the unwinding of the James Hebe era at Freightliner. Hebe bought a whole bunch of stuff, American LaFrance, Western Star, Ford heavy-truck (renamed Sterling), Thomas buses, Detroit Diesel, and started guaranteeing the resale price of used trucks as a way to win new truck business. He was forced out in 2001, only to resurface later at Seagrave and finally International/Navistar. The incoming Daimler bosses hung on to Sterling for a while but finally shut it down after first getting rid of American LaFrance (which finally went bust in 2014), though they kept the buses, Detroit Diesel, and Western Star. The weirdest one of those was perhaps the Detroit Diesel purchase, because inevitably DD engines stopped being offered by the other OEMs, leaving that market eventually to Cummins after Cat withdrew due to inability/unwillingness to meet emissions targets.
https://www.fleetowner.com/operations/article/21681209/hebe-takes-oem-post
Jim Hebe did almost kill Freightliner. It took them years to get out of that hole he dug with the guaranteed buybacks.
As the field of manufacturers narrowed vertical integration started to push out competitors.
Cummins is the only independent engine supplier left in the heavy truck business here.
We had bought 5 Volvo trucks around 1997 for plow trucks. We were using a lot of Cat engines at the time and Volvo dropped the Cats. Volvo is a major competitor of Cat in the heavy equipment business and I’m sure someone in Sweden wasn’t very happy that they were selling Cat engines in Volvo trucks. Volvo had already bought up and killed of GMC and White, they have virtually taken over Mack.
VW has grabbed up International.
A lot has changed during my career.